~ Perspective from Vancouver

New City of Vancouver Logo Benched

Metro News reports that the rather simple design for a new City of Vancouver logo which as Melody Ma has pointed out on Twitter is in Canuck hockey colours-has gone back to the drawing board.

For people that love Vancouver and care about its image and branding, the logo is important stuff. It will be used on city signs, business cards, stationary and flags.As previously reported in Price Tags, the City spent $8,000 or over $500 a letter to get a rather bland design, which apparently even imitated the Gotham font of that of the City of Chilliwack . Readers can also review the Abbotsford logo below.

We have somehow decided that chunky graphics are the way to go in a retro 1970’s mod style, with similar lettering and the lack of a cool mountain or scene graphic. Jen St. Denis of Metro News took it one step farther asking people to submit their own proposals to the newspaper.

Here’s the old logo below. The rationale for the change of logo is that it is difficult for people from other cultures and languages to understand. It also sounds like a bit of a make work project for a fancy sounding”prime business trigger”-as the Council report states:

the ” prime business trigger for this activity is referenced in the Vancouver Innovation Economy presentation to Council…In addition, results from a 2016 “Quality of Living Index” report conducted by Mercer and released annually states that Vancouver is ranked number five on a list of cities with the best quality of life in the world. This report stated that Vancouver ‘is among Canada’s densest, most ethnically diverse with 52% of its population having a first language that is not English.”

Mayor Gregor Robertson has now stated that the design is going to be shelved for now. In a statement he said “While there will never be a single design that satisfies everyone, over the last week, there have been some compelling cases raised about why a different approach is needed.” You can read Robertson’s statement here.

Of course other local graphic designers were puzzled at this bland logo.But it is not as much the graphic and the $8,000 as the amount of staff time that has been spent on this exercise, writing a report to Council, trademarking this design, and then thinking through the hours needed to reboot this design as the City’s brand.

In a City with a fentanyl crisis as well as a major crisis in affordability and a lack of housing why is staff time being taken up with changing a logo? Why is it that how things look is more important than some of the other more pressing issues? And what was exactly wrong with the old design in the first place?